Caskets are fundamentally bulky items and are thus expensive to ship. Modularity of casket design enhances shipment by breaking down the otherwise bulky casket into a plurality of pieces that can be easily transported in boxes of modest dimensions. However, modularity necessitates assembly that may prove too time-consuming or too complex for many end point users. Additionally, building modular caskets may prove a disruptive departure from the normal casket making process and thus deter manufacturers from pursuing the benefits of modularity. Therefore, any workable design must be very easy to both manufacture and assemble. Ideally, a modular casket should be easily assembled and disassembled without the out of tools.
Since the advantages of modularity are obvious, efforts in pursuit thereof are nothing new. U.S. Pat. No. 3,924,309 divides a casket into its canopy, body, and base that allows for a relatively fast assembly. U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,631 discloses strips of hinged panels with mutually cooperative flanges that enable the panels to be held rigid and form the casket body. More recent efforts sometimes succeed at breaking the casket parts down to more manageable sizes, but either the manufacture of the parts is too costly, see U.S. Pat. No. 8,584,327 that relies on numerous rare-earth permanent magnets, or the designs are dependent on materials that are not acceptable to the market, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,222,400; 7,730,595; 8,291,556; and 8,443,496.